Cricalix.Net

A few months back, a friend of mine (Hi Andy!) introduced me to City of Heroes. It’s a fairly interesting game, though I find the concept of shards of the world being wholly independent a bit restricting. If there are people all around the world playing, I’d like to be able to interact with them - much like how MUDs are.

Browsing around the other day on Ars Technica, I hopped into the Gaming forum and browsed a few of the threads. One of them was about a game called EVE Online, and the concept seemed quite cool. It’s essentially Elite on 3D steroids and a much, much bigger universe. Even better, everyone is in the same universe at the same time - there’s ‘one’ server (in reality, a cluster of blades), and everyone is visible. Well, sort of visible. If you’re not in the same region, or even solar system, you won’t see the person (other than perhaps the Corp channel etc).
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This weekend, I decided it was about time to do some maintenance on my fish tank. The water hadn’t been changed for over a month, the gravel was a bit too full of decomposing bits, one of my fish had vanished while I was on vacation, and the plants were taking over the aquarium. So, Saturday I popped into the local pet store and picked up a small holding tank and some water conditioner.

Sunday morning I cranked the heating up to keep the ambient temperature higher than normal (normal in my house right now is somewhere in the region of requiring sweat pants and a long sleeve shirt), and started transferring my fish from the big tank to the small tank. That went fine, or so I thought. As I’m cleaning the big tank, I happened to look at the smaller tank (which had the heater rod in it) - the male pearl gourami was floating just above the bottom of the tank, nary a fin moving.

Poked him with my finger, got no response. Guess the shock was too much for him :(

Never did find the body/bones of the other fish that vanished over the vacation - the plecostomus must have eaten the remains. Guess I’ll be going to Stapeley Water Gardens this weekend to get a replacement for the gourami, and possible another couple of small fish to liven the tank up a bit.

I use the virtual desktop feature of KDE fairly heavily. I have 8 working desktops, and most of them have something running at some point or another during the day. One of the annoyances with this approach is that if I want to drop a quick IM to someone on my roster, I have to click on the Kopete icon, choose the person from the list, click their name, wait for the window (granted, a fraction of a second), and then start typing. Annoying, at least to me.

So, I starting investigating a way to get a small window/applet/something on my desktop that would list the current people in my roster as a drop down, and have a small text field and a ‘Send!’ button. KJSEmbed looks like the way to do it, so off I go, looking for documentation.

That was problem number 1 - Google was a veritable wealth of SVN/CVS commits and bugs, but barely any documentation. I did manage to find a page on SourceXtreme that gave me some basic info though, and a link to the reference site.

Problem number 2 - the reference site has horrible API documentation (which has been a thread on Planet KDE recently). The examples are fairly ok, but it still hurt my head. I should mention that I do write code fairly often, but blah, that documentation hurt.

So I finally got things into a half-decent shape. I hopped right into QT designer, and whipped up a sweet little dialog. Yep, that’s problem 3 - I needed a widget, not a dialog. No, I don’t do GUI programming very often, and I may do it even less now :p So I recoded the UI as a widget. Whoa, it displays!

Next stage, work out how to reference all of the (2) text fields in the widget so I can make a DCOP call. A bit of reading of the SourceXtreme presentation and things became a bit clearer. So now I have a small KJS app that can display a window, fear me!

Next I messed up the KMainWindow::UI::connect() call, and had the 4th parameter pointing to a non-existent sub-routine. The error you get for this isn’t very useful though
Uncaught TypeError exception at: -2147483648
Yes, very clear.

So now I have a small app where you can press a button, and nothing happens. Well, the dcop.call to kopete->kopeteiface->messagecontact() returns false, so I can only guess it doesn’t like the parameters I’m passing to it. I’ve toString()’d the two fields that matter, but that obviously isn’t the answer.

If you’re a bored KDE programming guru, and want to poke me in the eye, these files should entertain you :)

Work got a new MFP (printer/copier/scanner/fax machine) - a Dell 1600n to be precise. Wandering around the net, I discover that supposedly the Samsung 4720F drivers will do the trick. Sounded good, so one 12 meg download later and a quick visit to sudo, I had the installer running. A graphical installer. Which didn’t tell you what it was doing. Which crashed X and Linux. Argh.

So, reboot. Loading modules. Kernel panic in insmod. Handler interrupted. Argh.

Reboot, load single user mode. Look in /var/log/messages to see what happened. Ooh, a kernel panic., and right before it, mfpproto having issues. cd /lib/modules. find . -name ‘mfp*’. rm with extreme predjudice. Reboot. Prompt!

Startx. YaKuake won’t load, nor will kopete.
yakuake: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libkdefx.so.4: undefined symbol: _ZN2Qt9lightGrayE

Scratch head, wander around the net. Reinstall qt and all of KDE to be sure. Recompile yakuake and kopete (as I’m using SVN trunk). Same error.

Stroke of genius (or lack of it as the case might be:
ldd /usr/bin/yakuake | grep qt
Eh, what do you mean /usr/lib.. libqt is in /usr/lib/qt-3.3/lib!

[13:54] duncanh@krypton ~/.ssh/yakuake-2.7.2> ls -l /usr/lib/libqt-mt.s*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 11002103 Jan 21 2005 /usr/lib/libqt-mt.samsung-mfp.so.3.0.4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Oct 17 13:16 /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3 -> libqt-mt.samsung-mfp.so.3.0.4
[13:54] duncanh@krypton ~/.ssh/yakuake-2.7.2> sudo rm -f /usr/lib/libqt-mt.samsung-mfp.so.3.0.4


One quick ln later, and the blighted error was gone.

I hate gui installers that replace system libraries without asking. My ML-1200 driver didn’t need this hassle - but that’s probably because it’s a single PPD file from linuxprinting.org.

As mentioned in the previous post, I went home for 2 and a half weeks at the end of September. The old saying about ‘the more things change, the more things stay the same’ comes to mind as I reflect on the break from work and England. Barbados, as a society, hasn’t really changed at all. A bit more modernised, a fair bit dirtier (litter), but on the whole, the same as 7 years ago.

Barbados as a country has changed dramatically compared to my memories. More cars, more litter, more houses, more buildings, more construction, more lights at night. Hotter too - several days were reported as 33C, feels like 40C. I don’t remember the ‘feels like’ value ever being that high, even at this time of year. Combined with 80%+ relative humidity and me being heavier than I should be, and I was quite warm most of the time.
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